Dead Watch

flight, not without registering them,” Jake said. “And they’re not going to register weapons with silencers, huh?”
    “Why didn’t they fly into Madison?”
    “Because the name might come up in a search, if someone like the FBI looked for flights going into Madison or Milwaukee, or anywhere in Wisconsin. They had to take a risk, but they minimized it by going to Chicago. Without this note . . . digging this out of the woodwork would be impossible, believe me. This is in the bottom of a computer file somewhere, and nobody will ever look at it again, without somebody asking for it. But since we know about it, they can’t escape. Because the paperwork is there.”
    “But they’ll have some kind of story about what they were doing in Chicago,” Madison said.
    “Probably. But this is a piece of the puzzle. And it tells me something. It tells me that your pal Barber probably didn’t do it.”
    They locked eyes for a moment, but she didn’t say it: I already told you that Barber didn’t do it. Don’t you trust me?
    “I trust you enough to plan a murder with you,” Jake said. “I wouldn’t even do that with Russell Barnes.”
    She asked, “What murder?”
    He said, “Just a minute. I’ve got to call Russell.”

    Jake went to the phone and called. “Russell. Look at the encrypted stuff, the encrypted messages. See if you can find one for the day before yesterday, originating in Chicago or anywhere in Illinois or Wisconsin.”
    “Hold on. I’ll queue them up.”
    Barnes was back in four minutes: “There’s one from Chicago at eight A . M ., very short. There’s another from Madison, Wisconsin, at two o’clock, even shorter.”

    “They did it,” Madison said. “You think his brother . . . ?”
    “Yeah. Darrell.”
    “Is that who we’re going to murder?”
    “Let me tell you about my idea for a play,” Jake said. “For a pageant . . .”
    “You mentioned that, but you didn’t tell me what you were talking about.”
    “That’s before I hired you as a wheelman,” Jake said.

    He told her about it, about the drama that he was planning for her living room. “If you do this, and I’m not telling you not to, you have to think it out like a chess game,” Madison said. “Right down to the last little move. You have to have a backup story in case anything goes wrong . . .”
    “But you’re not saying ‘no,’ ” Jake said. “You’re not arguing against it.”
    “No, I’m not,” she said. “Sometimes, justice isn’t enough. You need revenge.”
    “So. You’ll do it.”
    “Yes.”
    They stared at each other for a moment, then Jake said, “Call Johnson Black, have him come here to pick you up. You stand on your porch, make a brief statement about the gay stories. You go inside and talk to Black about whatever. When the TV people are gone, probably after the evening news, you call me. I’ll come over and we’ll do the drama.”
    She nodded. “Now I’m scared again. That’s twice in a day.”
    “We’re all in trouble here, Maddy,” Jake said. “This whole thing has been so complicated. But if there’s a bug—and there’s gotta be a bug, I’d bet on it now—Goodman knows that you know what Barber did to your husband. If he can find a way to make the tape public, you could go to prison. Maybe for a long time. You know what judges do to celebrities, just to prove that they’re not above the law . . . And if I don’t get that package to the FBI, I’m in trouble for the Madison shootings, myself. The drama might settle it.”
    “But we’re going to kill somebody. We’re premeditating.”
    “Yeah.” Again, they stared at each other for a bit, then Jake said, “Look. We’ve got a huge problem: we’ve got a psycho on our asses—or on yours, anyway. I might still skate. Sooner or later, though, they’ll have to do something about you. The new vice president can’t have any vocal opposition that alleges any kind of scandal, any kind of problem. If they’re thinking about Goodman, and you’re out here screaming that Goodman is a killer and a Nazi . . . it’s easy enough to choose somebody else. Arlo Goodman needs for you to go away, or to be discredited, or humiliated. And they’ve got a psychotic killer willing to do the heavy work.”
    “But there’s a hole in your idea. The way you set it out.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Yeah. What are you going to do with the other car?”
    Jake blinked. Then, “God. I’m a moron.”
    “You’re not a